BANGKOK, May 2, 2015:
Thai authorities on Saturday resumed the
excavation of a mass grave site in a remote patch of jungle where
migrants believed to be from Myanmar and Bangladesh were held for months
by people smugglers in appalling conditions.
The remains of 26 migrants thought to be
from Myanmar or Bangladesh have been exhumed from a mass grave after
Thai police ended their search today, as details emerged of the
maltreatment endured at the remote people smugglers’ camp.
Thai forensic teams dug out badly decayed
skeletons from shallow graves covered by bamboo and a few of feet of
dirt throughout Saturday, according to an AFP reporter at the abandoned
jungle camp in Sadao district, in Songkhla province.
“In total we have 26 bodies. As far as I
know one is a woman,” head of the forensic team Police General Jarumporn
Suramanee told AFP.
The Sadao district, in Thailand’s Songkhla province, borders Malaysia.
Earlier, efforts to dig up the remainder of the 30 graves were hampered overnight by heavy rain.
The cause of their deaths is not yet
clear, but further grim details emerged Saturday of the conditions
endured by the migrants, in what Thailand’s police chief has described
as a “virtual prison camp” where migrants were held in makeshift bamboo
cages.
Doctors treating the two sole survivors —
men aged 25 and 35-years-old — told AFP their patients were suffering
from a range of ailments.
“Both are malnourished, have scabies and lice,” doctor Kwanwilai Chotpitchayanku told AFP at Padang Besar hospital.
“The older man could not walk, he had to
be carried off the mountain. He hadn’t eaten anything for two days
before he was found. He told the translator he had a fever in the jungle
for two months.”
Doctors said the men had not been fully identified but were from either Bangladesh or Myanmar.
Both men were rigged to IV drips and were frail despite their young ages, according to an AFP reporter.
The border zone with Malaysia is
criss-crossed by trafficking trails and is notorious for its network of
secret camps where smuggled migrants are held, usually against their
will, until relatives pay up hefty ransoms.
“The camp is located high up on a hill,”
Police General Aek Angsananont, national police deputy commissioner,
told AFP, adding exhumations of the shallow graves had resumed on
Saturday.
A rescue workers told AFP four of the
dead were “skeletons” while the fifth died just a few days ago, seeming
to indicate the camp had been in existence for some time.
Tens of thousands of migrants from
Myanmar, mainly from the Rohingya Muslim minority but also increasingly
from Bangladesh, make the dangerous sea crossing to southern Thailand, a
well-worn trafficking route often on the way south to Malaysia and
beyond.
Thousands of Rohingya — described by the
UN as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities — have fled deadly
communal unrest in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state since 2012.
Thailand said it is cracking down on the
trafficking networks on its soil after revelations that government
officers, police and navy officials have been involved in the lucrative
trade in humans fleeing poverty and persecution.
In June the United States dumped Thailand
to the bottom of its list, or to “Tier 3″, of countries accused of
failing to tackle modern-day slavery.
Rights groups say traffickers are
changing their tactics as the crackdown bites and are also holding
thousands of migrants at sea for endless weeks awaiting payment before
releasing them.
Thailand’s human trafficking problem is “out of control”, according to Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch.
“The finding of a mass grave at a
trafficking camp sadly comes as little surprise,” he said, urging the UN
to join the probe to bring those responsible to justice.
Source : http://www.therakyatpost.com/world/2015/05/02/thai-authorities-resume-dig-at-migrant-mass-grave-site/